Now I know full well that there is much to be said against the step which I think America should initiate.  I suppose the weight of the reasons against it would be in some such order as the following:  First, that it is a violation of the ancient tradition of American statecraft and of the rule laid down by Washington concerning the avoidance of entangling alliances.  Second, that it may have the effect which he feared of dragging this country into war on matters in which it had no concern.  Third, that it will militarize the country, and so, Fourth, lead to the neglect of those domestic problems upon which the progress of our nation depends.

I will take the minor points first and will deal with the major consideration presently.

First, I would remind the reader of what I pointed out in the last article, that there is no such thing as being unaffected by the military policies of Europe, and there never has been.  At this present moment a campaign for greatly increased armaments is being waged on the strength of what is taking place in the Old World, and our armaments are directly and categorically dictated by what foreign nations do in the matter.  So that it is not a question in practice of being independent of the policies of other nations; we are not independent of their policies.

We may refuse to co-operate with them, to have anything to do with them.  Even then our military policy will be guided by theirs, and it is at least conceivable that in certain circumstances we should become thoroughly militarized by the need for preparing against what our people would regard as the menace of European military ambitions.  This tendency, if it became sufficiently acute, would cause neglect of domestic problems hardly less mischievous than that occasioned by war.

In my last article I touched upon a quite possible turn of the alliance groupings in Europe—­the growing influence of Russia, the extension of that influence to the Asiatic populations on her borders, (Japan and Russia are already in alliance,) so that within the quite measurable future we may be confronted by a military community drawing on a population of 500,000,000 souls, autocratically governed and endowed with all the machinery of destruction which modern science has given to the world.  A Russo-Chino-Japanese alliance might on behalf of the interest or dignity of one of the members of such a group challenge this country in some form or another, and a Western Europe with whom we had refused to co-operate for a common protection might as a consequence remain an indifferent spectator of the conflict.

Such a situation would certainly not relieve us from the burdens of militarism merely because we declined to enter into any arrangement with the European powers.  As a matter of fact, of course, this present war destroyed the nationalist basis of militarism itself.  The militarist may continue to talk about international agreement between nations being impossible as a means of insuring a nation’s safety, and a nation having no security but the strength of its own arms, but when it actually comes to the point even he is obliged to trust to agreement with other nations and to admit that even in war a nation can no longer depend merely upon the strength of its arms; it has to depend upon co-operation, which means an agreement of some kind with other nations as well.